XP Pro Very Slow - New Install

last week I replaced my hard rive with a 500 Gb WD drive and did a clean instal of XP.

I'm hooked up to a 6 meg DSL line and have good access.
Windows SP3 and Office 2007 is installed.
Running Symantec Corp AV 10.1.8.0.

When I open Outlook 2007, it takes about a minute to check email for two pop3 accounts on my web server. With the previous install, it took about 10 seconds to check these accounts.

I have 2 Gig Ram, 2- 250 gig partitions on my hd with 80% free space on both. I have scanned for spyware. Virtual memory is managed by Windows. Any ideas on why outlook and Windows in general is so slow?

A huge resource hog. It is most assuredly scanning the emails coming in and slowing the system down. It is also real-time scanning every file accessed, every file opened/closed/written/read. Every web page.

Symantec was fine until about 4 years ago. Now it is so intrusive and so hard to remove that I refuse to use it on any system. I call it the Virus of all Anti-virus.

Anyway, my two cents. Try disabling all of the protection that is enabled and test. Hopefully you won't have any trouble.

I just etsted Outlook in safe mode. It seems a bit faster, but just before I launched it in safe more, I closed it and went to the start menu. There was a definate three second delay from the time I clicked start to the time the start menu opened. It's like this PC is running in s l o w m o t i o n. . . .